Why is this marked as troll? He is answering the stated question to the best of his knowledge. If anything should be marked as troll, it is the question itself. What do you expect when you use such a subject term such as "crapware?"

And lose compatibility with many applications and newer peripherals, the majority of which are made for Windows and possibly Mac.

2. Buy a Mac and never worry about crapware again.

And lose compatibility with many applications, the majority of which are made for Windows. Sure, Adobe suite and some of Microsoft Office are ported, but some businesses depend on third-party apps that require Microsoft Access.

So there exists a tradeoff between compatibility and freedom from crapware. Was this your point?

Meh, I'd probably prefer to mod him down, too, for the bowling ball-like wit he demonstrates when talking about Apple. Either that or his keyboard's just that broken that it outputs "b" when he presses "p", but only after an "A".

As a note, I'd prefer to mod down the "Micro$oft" gits, too, for much the same reason. I take my sense of humor seriously.

I just bought an HP laptop, and these are the observations I have to make.

Bundled software isn't entirely bad. Bundled software that runs automatically is. I will disable this, although even so I might not uninstall it. The first thing I did was make the HP toolbar not run every time the computer boots up.

If it doesn't run automatically, and it performs some useful feature (DVD burning, for instance) which I'll probably use in the future, I'll leave it installed unless or until such a time comes where I try to use it and discover it doesn't work very well or there are better free alternatives. It's just taking disk space. I'm more concerned with RAM and processor use.

If it's something I'll never use, yeah, just uninstall it now.

However, all in all, it's a new computer, and I'm not at all worried about disk space yet. So as long as it's not running, I'm not too worried about it. Sure, in a few years I may begin to run low on disk space, but at that point I'll be better able to determine whether or not I actually need the software anyway – did I use it between now and then?

It can be said that Apples are among the smoothest running out of the box, but does that really mean there's no crap? This line of reasoning begs the definition of "crapware," and the #1 response would be "stuff you don't need on your computer." It doesn't have to slow it down, it doesn't have to have an enormous memory footprint when it's running or a huge disk footprint when it isn't, it just has to be stuff you don't need. And depending who you are, that can be quite a lot.

Have you ever used iWeb? iDVD? Some would consider the whole iLife to be crapware because they plan to get higher-end, more professional applications through which to vent their creativity. And if they're thinking about office use, they're likely to go the route of Microsoft Office / OpenOffice, so bang goes Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Do you ever plan to serve web pages up from your laptop? (Well, I do, but then again, look where I'm posting.) You probably don't need that install of Apache or PHP. Not planning on doing any software development? Yes, XCode is an optional install and not part of the standard kit, but you've still got perl, ruby, python, pico, vi, emacs, and more shells, libraries, and frameworks than you'll ever need nestled down in/usr/local. Have a digital music library already? Then you might also have a preferred player, and probably won't want iTunes to re-rip it into that silly AAC format. A lot of people despise Quicktime on general principle. And a lot of people still eschew Safari for Firefox despite its HTML5 support.

It all depends on your definition of "crapware." It's all assembled and designed by the mother company, so it's integrated so perfectly that you're never bothered by it if you never use it, but if you dig, you'll find something that'll fit the description.

By not being bug-for-bug identical (and if it was it would be dismissed as "a mere clone"). To these people to "compete" is do exactly the same thing in the same way. They'd claim Ford and Chevrolet don't compete because their cars have gas caps on opposite sides.

And the fact that there is a vast amount of software available for Linux and the Mac that is not available for Windows is irrelevant to them because they can't imagine anyone ever wanting to run any software not available for Windows.

For some reason most of them feel the need to autostart half a dozen services also... HP, I'm looking at you, but it's also true of just about all CD / DVD burning software.

Why a printer driver should be 89 MB is beyond logic or reason. And when I want to burn a CD, I'll start it manually.

I don't need 100+ services all running in the background monitoring hardware and sucking up memory and processor slices so I get a popup "logo / splash screen / helper" saying "it looks like you inserted a piece of A4, do you want to print something" ?

A bare Windows install isn't like Ubuntu or a Mac. It comes with only one browser, no way to play DVD's, no audio editor, no productivity applications. It doesn't even have an antivirus that we need Windows users to have from the start so as to delay their inevitable pwndom. It doesn't have shared repositories with thousands of free applications for every need. The poor users need some help bootstrapping from that to a useful platform, and the OEMs are driven to serve that need.

Trust me, Microsoft wants nothing more than to bundle it's own version of just about every application you can think of. But, the legal system says they can't. They were declared a monopoly and part of that has limited their ability to include things you want into the OS.

I'm not 'Pro MS' or 'Pro Linux' or anything, I just don't care. But I do think that it's funny that, essentially, the same people who used to complain that Microsoft is an evil monopoly and is destroying small companies by bundling their own XYZ into the operating system are now the same people who still say MS is an evil monopoly but advocate Linux because it includes far more stuff you'll need than Windows.

But yeah, it's really not that MS doesn't want it - it's that it's hands are tied. At least, that's been my understanding of it.

Umm, if it were pre-installed (I've never seen that) isn't that exactly what iTunes would be? Unless it's installed by Apple on a Mac. Then it fails the third party test though all the rest is still there.

Then why is a Dell Mini 9 (or Vostro A90 is the new branding I think) with Windows XP and (presumably) a bunch of crapware $50 MORE than the one with Ubuntu? Wouldn't they be the same price if the crapware flattened out the windows license?

But, RobDude - several other people have pointed out that there are alternatives to Adobe reader, that are lighter to download, lighter to install, and lighter on system resources, not to mention being faster AND better. Let's suppose that Adobe really is the end-all, be-all, ultimate shitzls for reading a PDF. Why does it autostart at system startup? Joe Sixpack might look at two PDF files a MONTH, but Adobe is loaded on his box at each startup and/or logon. Why? All he wants to do is play a game of Doom, drink his sixpack, and pat the wife on the ass, but he's forced to sit there watching the startup screen for 2/3 of eternity. By definition, crapware. Adobe can get in line, and wait for the user to call it.

The OEM's need to install fewer of these apps, they need to find the fastes, lightest weight app to do the job, and they need to configure those apps properly. And, DO NOT add things in that EVER "phone home" - even for updates - without the owner's explicit permission.

A question for anyone here, which if any of those PDF readers works properly with PDF forms?

*** I'm not flaming, I really want to know. I would love to not have to install Adobe Reader as its big and slow but we use a lot of PDF forms here and so far the alternatives I have tried just don't work with them or don't work right/well.

The nice thing about Win7/Vista is that all the versions of the OS are decided by the key used. This means I can take my copy of Win7/Vista OEM install it on my mom's comp and use her key and it'll downgrade itself to whatever her key is. Since her HP doesn't come with a vanilla copy of windows, just a restore disc that includes all the crapware pre-installed, this is nice.

the assumption by software vendors that their software is so important that it should auto-start

It is not exactly that they think their software is that important... it is a way of cheating.

When they "auto-start" the app when the operating system loads, they are pre-loading some memory and executing some initialization. So then, when you go to start their program.... BAM! It pops up so quickly! What a great piece of software, it is so fast!!!

I've seen FoxIt render stuff incorrectly on occasion. It also seems to have more problems with PDF forms. Thus, any OEM pre-installing it risks running into a problem where one user (out of 10^n) finds a PDF that won't open correctly.

Apple 'encrypting' the iTunes database has nothing to do with anything.

The fact you can't install Apple Mobile Device service without iTunes, and you can't connect your iPod or iPhone without that, is the problem. There's plenty of third party software that will do almost everything iTunes will, like put your own music or videos on there, or syncing address books. And for the rest, like buying software and music for the phone, you can use the device itself to do it.

But you can't, in any way, communicate with your computer without the stupid Apple Mobile Device service on said computer, even if you're using a third party app to do it, and to get that service you need to install iTunes.

I don't mind the installs, disk space is cheap, but it wants to start a bunch of crap processes on boot up, and good luck killing them without mucking about in the registry. Slower boot times and a performance hit, thanks a lot, Apple!